07/10/2000

My iBook (and Airport station, card, extra memory) came this morning. I'm still excited -- I don't have it all set up yet, but I'm looking forward to working outside.

There's an aspect aside from just the wireless, portability thing -- I feel very keenly the weight of all the towers and giant monitors and industrial-strength furniture required to support computers. It's as if we live on the surface of Jupiter. In the future, people will look back on this era as a kind of '50s era. The '50s: cars were huge, X-Rays were poisonous, and housewives took horse tranquilizers for their nerves. The early '00s: computers were heavy and stationary, monitors were as big and heavy as vacuum-tube TVs. We're transitioning away from the gigantic-ness of computers. I hope.

Perhaps I'm over-sensitive, but all this plastic and metal and glass has always seemed like so much unneccesary ballast.

If you're old enough, do you remember before you had a computer? We don't actually need this big appliance (or several of them) to anchor us to the ground, we'll do fine, we'll do better, with the small and light.

I hate when I can't find something on Napster. Looking for Julee Cruise's cover of "Summer Kisses Winter Tears." Which I actually have on a CD around here, but I want to add it to my Napster playlist. Nuts.

Update: I discovered that the Napster servers aren't connected together. So if you disconnect, then reconnect, you might find things you couldn't find before, because you'll be on a different Napster server. The above is a case in point -- I searched again, couldn't find it, disconnected, reconnected, found it.

Is every made-for-TV movie about people getting terribly sick and then having an angel come rescue them? Watching ads on TV gave me the chance to utter this negative-creep-sounding line: "I hate miracles." Sheila suspects people will start getting sick on purpose just so they can have a heart-warming experience as seen on TV.

Speaking of TV. What part of "this is a clichéd joke that wasn't even funny the first time" don't you understand?

Here's something I'm glad about on TV -- we appear to be coming to the end of those commercials whose slogans always have the form of philosophical pronouncement followed by a command. You know what I mean: "Life is muddy. Wallow in it." Ugh, finally, at last, we're seeing less of this.